slick snow

The weather has gotten nastier, not that there is more snow, but that there is lots of wind to blow it onto the roads and then freeze it solid. The roads are so slick that I have had to drive slowly to work and back. As proof of my wisdom I witnessed two hunks of metal and glass off the side of Wheeling Pike between Muncie and State Road 28 on my way home.

sky triad

Tonight, a bright Venus, a little less bright Jupiter, and a crescent moon appear close together (in conjunction) this evening. I have seen this eerie triangle through the edges of the dark clouds as I peered out my car window. It was about as much as I will see them, because the clouds obscured them again.

work

The University Computing Service at work turned off power to the campus servers to make upgrades. One of those servers runs the campus Active Directory, which identifies all networked computers and gives them authority to use the network. When that server came back up, it reauthorized all the Windows boxes. But not the Macs in the library. I had to do that this morning after learning that all of them were off the network.

legacy?

El Dubya is already thinking about his legacy. He is trying to tout his accomplishments. And what would those be, eh? [The Bush administration] wants the country to remember more than the war in Iraq, the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, and all the government bailouts to help a crashing economy. But of course we remember more than these: The loss of freedoms under the mislabeled PATRIOT Act, the refusal to rein in the predatory lending practices responsible for setting off the financial crisis, the abuse of science and technology policy to score political points, and the incompetence and myopia that was the hallmark of his underlings from Dick Cheney on down. And that is if you believe he was an actual president instead of a wooden dummy to Dick Cheney’s ventriloquist. Let’s just clean up the mess he made and forget he was ever there.